Kosovo's government has rejected accusations prime minister Hashim Thaci once headed a criminal network that trafficked in human organs.

The Council of Europe says Mr Thaci and other military leaders took kidneys from Serb prisoners in the late 1990s.

The report also accuses Mr Thaci of involvement in political assassinations and controlling the heroin trade after the conflict with Serbia in 1999.

But government spokesman Memli Krasniqi says the accusations have been brought by those who want to bring Kosovo down.

"This is absolutely ridiculous, this is absolutely untrue and this doesn't make any sense to anyone that has ever been in Kosovo," he said.

"This is Serbian propaganda at its best."

The report by Dick Marty, rapporteur for the Council's Parliamentary Assembly committee on legal affairs and human rights, also accused Western powers of complicity in ignoring crimes dating back to the late 1990s for the sake of preserving regional stability.

It was released a day after results showed Mr Thaci's party won Sunday's first post-independence election.

"Thaci and these other 'Drenica Group' members are consistently named as 'key players' in intelligence reports on Kosovo's mafia-like structures of organised crime," said the report.

"We found that the 'Drenica Group' had as its chief - or, to use the terminology of organised crime networks, its 'boss' - the renowned political operator and perhaps most internationally recognised personality of the KLA, Hashim Thaci."

Mr Marty noted one of the centres for the operation was in the Albanian town Fushe-Kruje, 20 kilometres north of Tirana, describing it as a "state-of-the-art reception centre for the organised crime of organ trafficking".

"It was styled as a makeshift operating clinic, and it was the site at which some of the captives held by KLA members and affiliates had their kidneys removed against their will," the report said.

Quoting its sources, the report said: "the ringleaders of this criminal enterprise then shipped the human organs out of Albania and sold them to private overseas clinics as part of the international 'black market' of organ-trafficking for transplantation."

You have no doubt been hearing a lot about the Paris Agreement and know that it pertains to climate change, but are too embarrassed at this stage to ask for an overall explanation of what it's all about.